THE UNITED STATES and Europe have a blind date with history. By 2020, decisions made about the alliance of purpose and the union of necessity built during the Cold War will leave each either more united and stronger, or more divided and weaker. In June 2016, a referendum in Britain changed the terms of its relations with the European Union, but it may also have reactivated its indispensability to its member states, and even strengthened the role of NATO as a unifying factor with the United States. Now, the thirty-four members of NATO and the EU (including twenty states, not including Britain, that belong to both) need a Transatlantic Strategic Dialogue to share strategic foresight and provide policy input for a world of increasing complexity and permanent crises.

In all instances, the aim is to achieve a complementarity of action: even when the transatlantic partners do not act together on every issue, they can still make sure that together they act on all issues that shape the battle of ideas no less than the battlefield. If not America with Europe, with whom? If not Europe as a union, how? If not the EU and NATO, what? And if not now, when?

“Foreigners are not like the folks I’m used to,” Lyndon B. Johnson reportedly said. If asked, he might have added that the Europeans came closest to the folks he knew. Yet, this special affinity is ending. This is a demographic fact of life, which is unlikely to be reversed. Consider: As recently as 1965, 84 percent of all Americans were non-Hispanic whites; by 2015, that share had declined to 62 percent, with the Hispanic share rising from 4 to 18 percent while the Asian share rose from less than 1 to 6 percent. Now, non-Hispanic whites are projected to fall to 46 percent by 2065, with the Hispanic share of the population rising to 24 percent, and the Asian share to 14 percent, while the African American share will remain steady at about 13 percent. These trends suggest a post-American America whose world map is moving away from the Atlantic basin, which is where America was born, down to Latin America where it used to dominate and across the Pacific where it has been drifting.

Such a cultural separation, which also involves a significant demographic shift of Europe southward, makes it all the more important to move toward some transatlantic institutional finality—meaning a better understanding of the modalities that will govern the terms of transatlantic and intra-European relations. But now, instead, the EU is fading and NATO looks stale, with the latter arguably the least influential it has been since 1949 and with the EU visibly more troubled than at any time since the Maastricht Treaty in December 1991. For Britain to say “No” to Brexit would not have been enough to reverse either condition. But for Britain to have said “Yes” leaves Europe historically disfigured and geographically dismembered—a post-Atlantic Europe that moves America away and brings Russia closer, while making Germany more dominant and the EU less important.

 

THE CONSTRUCTION of Europe as “an ever-closer union” is often told as a fairy tale, including a happy ending. But it was written as a complex tale of treaties fraught with ambiguities and contradictions that made the recurrence of institutional crises inevitable. For the process to go on as it did, four conditions had to be met: first, robust and evenly shared economic growth to sustain a permissive consensus in all member states; second, stable and confident centrist national leaderships, whether left- or right-leaning; third, regional security, threatened in the east during the Cold War and in the south since September 11, 2001 especially; and fourth, a bi- or multinational locomotive to help keep the process moving after the United States had gotten it started during the first postwar decade.

As a whole, these conditions do not exist today. National borders are being closed again, the single currency is at risk, prosperity is receding as growth stagnates and unemployment remains high. Inequalities between the EU member states are widening, intra-EU bilateral relations are tense, the case for solidarity is shattered, democratic politics is under assault and security is at risk. Local and global anxieties reflect widely shared premonitions of impending disasters that the EU seems unable to deter or manage. In short, the idea of Europe has turned into a contentious issue as its citizens disagree over what the EU is, debate what it does, ignore what it has achieved and differ over what it should do next—all with self-defeating populist, anti-EU tones that raise the risks of institutional rollback. Predictably enough, this is cause for apprehension in the United States, whose interest in an ever-closer and bigger Europe now seems stronger than many EU members.

What next, then, for 2020? Brexit has made at least one thing clear: “muddling through” one crisis at a time with barely enough economic growth to permit incremental gains that mask a steady rise of public skepticism is not an option. Given the state of the union and the lack of unity within each state, inaction would be a choice for more regression and fragmentation. At half past the 2010s, three paths remain open, each with a chance to succeed but all vitiated by weaknesses.

A first path to 2020 would end the institutional logic of an ever-closer union (bigger is better, deeper is smarter and stronger is safer) and would instead follow a logic of cleavage (smaller is wiser, lesser is better and weaker is cheaper). Europe, in this scenario, would fragment into old-fashioned clusters of states to stop the refugees where the Habsburg Empire used to prevail, or to contain Russia east of the former Warsaw Pact members, or to return to Europe’s starting core of six states plus a very few, if willing and as needed. Admittedly, anticipating the regression and rollback of the EU is hardly new; but that it would no longer be limited to professional Euroskeptics reflects an unprecedented depth of concern over the fissures that have appeared during the past few years. While a clear majority of EU citizens still welcomes membership (71 percent approval), a nearly equal number objects to its policies and methods (72 percent), which leaves the EU increasingly vulnerable to the next crisis, meaning more Brexits and less Europe.

A second path would extend Germany’s unipolar moment in Europe at least to 2020. However, with sluggish and uneven EU-wide economic growth—1.5 percent or less—an austerity-conscious Germany that outperforms its partners would remain economically depressing and politically oppressive, thus increasing the resentment of a number of EU members about German leadership (now at 53 percent for, and 47 percent against) and deepening Berlin’s ambivalence about the burdens of EU membership. This is not just about Germany as Europe’s problem; it is also about Europe as Germany’s problem.

In a climate of strategic retrenchment, welcomed by Germany, and economic nationalism, favored by many EU members, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) would likely be stalled and eventually abandoned by an increasingly indifferent U.S. Congress and hostile national parliaments in Europe. Even with reduced refugee flows and no immediate prospect for another round of enlargement, anti-EU populist pressures would remain high, inducing more calls for a renationalization of, or opt-out from, some EU policies, notwithstanding feeble German attempts to steer the union away from institutional shrinkage and “save” the EU from itself and its citizens. Already, Germany’s political restlessness, demographic pressures and vulnerability to a sluggish world economy may be too difficult to overcome for its hegemonic role to last much beyond the end of the decade anyway—with or without a weakened Angela Merkel, but above all with no reliable alternative members able or willing to lead the EU.

A third path to 2020 would gradually reset Europe. With Brexit acting as a wake-up call, Europe’s institutional rebalance would be conceived one issue at a time around a political “new deal” that would follow a cycle of national elections—including France and Germany in 2017 after new elections in Britain would also have reorganized its relations with the union. (Remember the political turnover that shaped the Western pivot of the years 1979–83, from Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl?) A more prosperous global economy, buoyed by surging American and Chinese markets, would permit stronger and more evenly distributed gains among EU members. With a motivated new U.S. administration and stronger European governments, TTIP, including Britain and possibly other European members of NATO that are not EU members, could move forward and help to unleash the full potential of the transatlantic economy for a genuine transatlantic marketplace by 2025.

Entering a new decade, negotiations for further EU enlargement would also gain momentum, and improved conditions in the Middle East would reduce the flows of refugees and, together with better economic conditions, help abate populist pressures. With the gradual erosion of Germany’s unipolar moment, a wider leadership for the EU would facilitate the institutional reforms needed for what used to be known as Europe’s “finality,” as well as reset EU relations with a fading Russia and insist on a more active role elsewhere.

 

WHICH OF these conceptions of Europe’s future does the United States favor? The answer should be obvious. Putting an end to half a century of total wars, an ever-closer Europe has been cause for much satisfaction in the United States, and unsurprisingly, it remains the most desirable path to 2020. (In 2000, a survey of 450 American historians and political scientists singled out the reconstruction of Europe as the most successful U.S. policy since 1945, ahead of the civil-rights legislation and forty-eight other American achievements during the second half of the twentieth century.) Europe as a union, even without Britain onboard, stands as America’s most vital partner to address shared national anxieties and manage global turbulence. Indeed, since the Berlin-plus arrangements signed a decade ago granted the EU access to NATO planning, assets and capabilities, the EU is already a nonmember member of NATO, as in so many ways, the United States (and now Britain) has become a nonmember member state of the EU.

“We are going to stay—period,” President Truman declared during the first Berlin crisis in June 1948. America would stand with Europe. That was clarity. For the next forty years, the legitimacy of U.S. leadership in and with Europe grew out of its capabilities, which were shared with its allies; its intent, which was relatively benign; its methods, which remained generally war-averse; and its efficacy, which helped transform Europe into a community, now a union. That was an era of containment—a third way between the two strategic failures that had defined the first half of the twentieth century: brinkmanship à la 1914 and appeasement à la 1938.

During the twenty-five years since the Cold War, much of that legitimacy has dissipated—America’s reputation for efficacy has been devalued, with its capabilities discounted, its intent questioned and its methods challenged. There is plenty of blame to pass around: to Bill Clinton, who neglected Russia in the 1990s; to George W. Bush, who mismanaged the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; to Barack Obama, who mishandled the Arab Spring after 2011; but also to Europe, where every problem seemed to depend on and await a U.S. solution.

For the first time in seventy years, the geopolitical landscape appears to have no leadership, no balance and no regulated order—a baffling world in mutation in which three rules of engagement prevail. First, no state and no institution, however preponderant, can be decisive without capable allies and complementary partners. Unilateralism does not pay: we are all multilateralists now. Second, no single dimension of power can suffice. Power is not readily divisible and no country can rely for long on one kind of capability, military or otherwise, without access to the others. And third, no issue, however significant, can define the new global order—neither the Soviet collapse in 1991 nor the dramatic aftermath of September 2001, the financial crisis of 2007, the Arab Spring of 2011, or even the rise of the Islamic State in 2014.

Forget, then, about the follies of total wars, the logic of containment, the bipolar duels of the Cold War and the swagger of unipolarity. Early in the twenty-first century, there are three overlapping and cumulative security agendas that provide little room for moral clarity and strategic coherence: postwars, postsecular and postnational.

 

FIRST, A traditional postwars agenda born out of unfinished territorial and ideological business and clashing national interests and ambitions begins with a restive Russia. In August 2008, the short war in Georgia reignited Russian expansionism. The annexation of Crimea and the dismemberment of Ukraine, followed by an increasingly assertive posture in Syria, have made an unmistakable point. Russia is back—from its humiliating Cold War surrender in 1989 and from the wartime revolution that hijacked its name in 1917.

America and Europe have a shared interest in a stable and united Russia. Russia is not a European power, but it is a very significant power in Europe—too big, too near, too nuclear, too resourceful and too resentful to be either ignored or provoked. Russia’s military spending is an important, but inconclusive, indicator of its challenge to Europe. Moscow’s defense budget more than doubled between 2005 and 2013, improving its efficacy first in Georgia (2008), next in Crimea and Ukraine (2014), and most recently in Syria (2015). Yet, the test administered by Vladimir Putin is not primarily military but political: Russia’s influence in Europe and around the world has grown by default and improvisation no less than by design and vocation.

But a new Cold War is not upon us. While a strong and resolute NATO remains indispensable to deter the Kremlin’s ambitions, a Euro-Atlantic military clash is not a credible prospect so long as Russia stays out of any NATO and EU country. What Europe needs is a moderate buildup of U.S. forces (down to an all-time low of twenty-six thousand), more U.S. support for the NATO (and EU) members alarmed by the Russian imperial relapse and more efficient defense spending from EU countries. Russia, however, is running out of time, as its resources, capabilities, people and security space dwindle. Putin is finding it difficult to sustain his costly geopolitical portfolio. “We should not be thinking about how to cope with America,” a surprisingly subdued Putin acknowledged during his yearly television call-in in mid-April 2016, “we should think about how to cope with our internal problems.”

In short, Europe and the United States should not run out of strategic patience before Russia runs out of actionable capabilities. Au fond, NATO has maintained much of its initial strategic consistency: keep Russia away, settle America in and build the EU up. The stage is being set for yet another reset, and Russia should engage constructively on specific issues, including Ukraine. There, the Minsk Agreement framed a window of opportunity that may not stay open for long after Obama departs in 2017 and before Putin runs one year later. This fleeting opportunity is premised on the EU-based economic incentives for Putin to calm the violence in the second-largest country in the post-Soviet world, and the NATO-shaped strategic interests for the West to end the instability in its closest neighbor (and one of the Northern Hemisphere’s poorest countries).

China is by far the world’s most credible rising power. Unlike Russia, its power fundamentals are strong and durable. Although vulnerable to external conditions beyond its control, the Chinese government can afford to take its time. It is no longer the passive bystander it used to be. Beijing is growing more assertive in the South China Sea, more intrusive in neighboring Vietnam, North Korea and Pakistan, and more active in the greater Middle East, from Iran and Sudan to the Islamic State. Also unlike Russia, for now at least the main concern with China is over financial stability, including an economic slowdown (with growth drifting down to between 5 and 7 percent) and a deepening debt trap (with a weaker currency and a high level of nonperforming loans) to which the Euro-Atlantic economy is heavily sensitive.

There is still much uncertainty over whether and how China will ultimately use its rising capabilities and influence. Politically, China must avoid another of the many epic errors of governance it has made over the past decades, like the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and the one-child policy. Economically, China needs more time before it can claim the status to which it aspires. To that extent, it has little interest in undermining a global economic order that is still best managed by and with the West. For that reason, even though Russia will constitute the most immediate security priority for the rest of the decade, it is the geostrategic rise of China that presents the most formidable security challenge.

Neither NATO nor the EU can remain indifferent to this agenda, but neither can address it alone as well as with each other. Germany at the turn of the past century and the Soviet Union during the interwar years serve as reminders of the unintended consequences of strategic neglect and divisiveness. But irrespective of the next U.S. administration’s intent, priorities and resolve, no balanced transatlantic partnership will emerge meaningfully unless the states of Europe assume together the greater role to which they aspire, and which the United States expects.

 

SECOND, A daunting postsecular agenda has grown out of the most recent shocks in the greater Middle East, including the Arab Spring and the rise of the Islamic State. Like Europe’s “bloodlands” and the Balkans in the past, this is a region where land was allocated and moved at the pleasure of history and for the convenience of geography. Imaginary states created by colonial masters in the Levant are steadily deterritorialized while their lands are destroyed and their people savaged. These phantom limbs in the region’s body politic haunt the new world order and threaten the Euro-Atlantic zone’s institutional stability. Since 9/11, the region has imploded—yes, do blame America. Middle Eastern states are the legacy of an imperial order conceived elsewhere—yes, blame Europe. Everywhere now, self-induced or externally produced civil wars cross the lines between the sectarian and the secular—yes, don’t forget to blame Islam too. With everyone eligible for blame, no one can escape responsibility behind the fallacy of self-serving retrenchment, the illusion of a reassuring time out or the delusion of a bit of “leadership from behind.” For the United States and Europe the strategic choices are narrowing.

This postsecular agenda—in, from and about the greater Middle East—is especially urgent. Afghanistan is representative of the difficulty. After September 11, this was widely viewed as a legitimate war; now, after fifteen years, progress in pacification, reconstruction and stabilization remains far from satisfactory and ever further from resolution.

Regretfully, Afghanistan is not an aberration, and no Euro-Atlantic country can be sure that future interventions will yield results. The secular war in Iraq, which aimed at regime change, became a sectarian war for Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s removal. Now that the rise of the Islamic State has forced the need for a return of U.S. forces, it is time to address two daunting questions. Can Iraq ever have a functioning state at peace with itself, and if not, what is there to assist and against whom? Can any Iraqi state ever live at peace with its neighbors, and if not, what is there to deter and by whom?

Elsewhere, the situation is getting worse: in Tunisia and Egypt, where the Arab Spring got its start, but also in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Sudan. The latter four are dying states buried under civil wars that are spilling over into neighboring Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria and, increasingly, Turkey—an important NATO member (but not a member of the EU) dangerously singled out by the Islamic State as a target of choice. Risks of a meltdown are also rising in Saudi Arabia, and the next Israeli-Palestinian war seems near, separate from but also inseparable from everything else in the region. Finally, while a military confrontation with Iran has been postponed, the risk cannot be discarded yet, especially as Tehran extends its reach and influence throughout the area.

The Middle East is a region where surprises are expected, but even so the current implosion has been surprising. Agreeing on, or debating, what should not have been done (as in Iraq), or what was not done (as in Syria), or done poorly (as in Libya) and late (as in Iran) is easier than agreeing and acting on what should be done now. The region does not lend itself to much strategic coherence: if the enemy of my enemy is not my friend, but the enemy of my friend is not my enemy, who is my friend? In the century’s new global Balkans, this is a true Sarajevo moment, whose only strategic clarity is the urgency it conveys. By 2020, the expanding area of homeless nations, rearranged into sects, tribes and clans, will define the region and shape a new status quo—either much better or much worse but not the same.

President Obama’s professorial talk about “the unfixable” greater Middle East may well be justified. But that is the tyranny of primacy: as it has been noted, great powers do not do windows. Given this bleak picture, the Euro-Atlantic community’s fragmented response has failed to exploit its complementary range of national and institutional capacities—political, economic, military and social strengths with which to reduce the region’s instabilities and counter the spread of militant radical Islam. In a globalized and interconnected world, withdrawal from this struggle is not an option. A Transatlantic Strategic Dialogue would aim at some informal understanding as to which states or institutions should take the lead in producing the “first draft” of a comprehensive policy for consideration by all the members of the Euro-Atlantic community in response to, or in anticipation of, an evolving or emerging crisis.

 

THIRD, A postnational agenda transcends the nation-state and exceeds its capacity for effective management alone. Included in this agenda are slow-moving issues that do not sustain public interest and are bundled into circumstances that cannot be resolved without broad interstate cooperation: flows of refugees who seek an escape from failed and failing states; the rise of radical militant Islam within the Euro-Atlantic states; energy security; structural economic relations, including the management of multilateral institutions so as to make room for the emerging economies; the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, including loose nukes, a subject now dominated by the ambitions of Iran, the defiance of North Korea, the instabilities of Pakistan and the known unknowns of the Islamic State; environmental concerns, including the nearly universally acknowledged threat of global warming and the enforcement of the Paris Agreement of December 2015; the unregulated and potentially decisive world of cyberspace; and much more.

In responding to these threats and challenges, Europeans and Americans face institutional rigidities that diminish their capabilities and stand in the way of successful outcomes. NATO often falls short because it lacks nonmilitary functionality; the reverse applies to the EU, because it lacks political punch to complement its economic jab; meanwhile, NATO-EU and EU-American dialogues often bog down on mundane qui-fait-quoi questions of competence between the institutions or among their members. Yet, even in a world in mutation said to be turning post-Western, the United States, NATO and the EU offer a unique set of relevant and complementary capabilities to lead in a multilateral context.

These capabilities will be made more effective if they can rely on a shared Euro-Atlantic security framework that includes EU members that are not in NATO and European members of NATO that are not in the EU. If twenty-one EU members can agree with their six NATO partners on a strategic concept, they should also be able to agree with their other seven EU partners on a strategic framework paper that can accommodate the six non-EU members of NATO. What is included in this document will be important, of course, and drafting it will not be easy. But as significant as its specific content will be, the demonstration that the Euro-Atlantic community shares a common view of the world is paramount.

 

IT IS in Europe that America completed its apprenticeship as a superpower, and it is with the United States that the former great powers of Europe regained their composure and confidence. Now, after half a century of total wars, and another of containment, this is a moment of permanent crisis. Neither the United States and NATO, nor the states of Europe and the EU, can passively await a solution. In December 1995, which was a time of transition, a New Transatlantic Agenda (NTA) was designed to respond to major political and institutional changes in Europe, including the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Treaty on the European Union. The dialogue that followed proved to be the high point of transatlantic economic integration for an entire decade, and shaped a “big-bang” enlargement of the Euro-Atlantic community. But although the NTA facilitated cooperation on counterterrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, it proved to be of limited relevance to high-politics issues, and transatlantic political differences therefore remained high, and policies erratic. It is that deficit that now needs correction to meet the strategic challenges of the moment.

A new transatlantic agenda with an elevated focus on security and foreign policy would not pretend to minimize differences in attitudes or interests on specific issues and regions of concern. Nor would it neglect the distinct mission, structure and identity of both NATO and the EU. Nor, finally, would it suggest that what is good for one transatlantic partner is necessarily beneficial, in equal measure, to all the others. But it would imply that what is bad for either institution, or any of its members on one side of the Atlantic, is likely to be bad for the other. And it would facilitate a process of Euro-Atlantic Political Coordination with a vital set of capabilities to help promote shared interests, common objectives and compatible values in a dangerously turbulent world.

Simon Serfaty is a professor of U.S. foreign policy and eminent scholar at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He holds the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair (emeritus) in Global Security and Geostrategy at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (csis). Some of his most recent books include A World Recast (2012), Un monde nouveau en manque d’Amérique (2014), Architects of Delusion (2008) and Vital Partnership (2004).

Image: “U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry listens to newly installed British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson addresses reporters in the gilded Lacarno Media Room in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in London U.K., on July 19, 2016, during a news conference following their first bilateral meeting. [State Department Photo/ Public Domain]”